Hello Fintech Friends,

The first Fintech Meetup was an incredible success! While I wasn’t able to make it (and had FOMO for the duration of the conference), it looks like the entire fintech world converged once more for two days in Las Vegas.

From what I heard, it was a much less-crowded Money2020, focused on in-person networking and connections, to start the year’s conference circuit off. Someone I talked to called it "the most well-organized conference I've been to." Congrats to Anil and Jon for pulling off the virtual to in-person transition and organizing the next big fintech conference.

And if you missed it, TWIF Head of Community Cristina Ciaravalli gave a talk with other luminaries Alex Johnson, Jason Mikula, and Marcel van Oost!

You can check out more of what Cristina's up to at one of our events or in our fintech community.

What other fintech conferences and weeks are people planning to attend this year? Which are you most excited for? (I'll be at UK and NY Fintech Week.)

👍👎 Have feedback for us? Let us know!

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

Join us for the future of fintech at Fintech Nexus USA! Connect with top industry leaders, innovators, and investors as they discuss topics, such as digital banking, fraud, credit, lending, payments, blockchain, AI, regulation, and more. This is the place to network with senior professionals and explore new business opportunities. Register now for a chance to be part of the premier fintech event of the year and use our promo code Partner15_TWIF to get 15% off your ticket!

💼 Fintech Job of the Week

PenChecks is hiring a Senior Director of Product Management

Flexport is hiring a Senior Software Engineer, FinTech

Looking for your next adventure in fintech? Come check out our job board and join our Talent Collective.

💬 Quote of the Week

📖 Read of the Week

Lithic’s Nikil Konduru published 4D Chess in Card Payments, a well-written writeup on debit payments, network tokenization, and the future for debit networks.

“There’s a unique moment of opportunity right now with trillions of dollars worth of debit card payments volume up for grabs, and for the first time in a long time, it’s not obvious that the establishment is going to successfully keep the invaders at bay. Where regulators, merchants, and regional debit networks were banking on ‘least-cost routing’ to increase competition, Visa and Mastercard were seemingly already two steps ahead with ‘network tokenization’. But as crafty as the global network giants are, this round seems to have gone to the challengers and this creates some powerful knock-on effects for players across the card payments ecosystem.”

📊 Stat of the Week

“Within fintech, buy now, pay later (BNPL) merchants faced a massive 211% increase [in fraud between 2021 and 2022], and crypto exchanges saw a 45% surge.” (Source)

53% of surveyed consumers are turning to digital apps to send and receive funds around the world. (Source)

🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

UK bank NatWest launched its own proprietary digital ID service.

📰 Other News

The Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, Bank of England, Bank of Canada, Bank of Japan, and Swiss National Bank announced measures aimed at making dollar swap lines more readily available to support stressed banking systems. Meanwhile, The Fed bumped its benchmark rate 0.25% to 4.75%-5%, in a sign that it doesn't expect the bank crisis to be widespread.

JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and other banks are trying to prop up First Republic Bank.

The FDIC denied a report that the purchaser of Signature Bank will have to give up the bank’s crypto business, but… can you picture continuing to run the business in this regulatory environment? The Federal Reserve is also considering more stringent tougher capital and liquidity requirements for midsize banks and more frequent stress tests following the multiple bank failures.

Bank BNP Paribas partnered with fintech Hokodo to go into business-to-business buy-now-pay-later.

Mastercard was certified as a digital ID provider in the UK and re-engineered its Click to Pay, Secure Card on File and Mobile Point-of-Sale (MPOS) solutions.

BBVA set up a business unit called Spark in Colombia to work with startups and entrepreneurs.

Morgan Stanley is testing OpenAI’s chatGPT to see if it can help financial advisors.

A US court upheld a $5.6 billion antitrust class-action settlement between 12 million retailers and Visa and Mastercard over interchange fees.

The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority sent a letter to almost 300 fintech firms citing unacceptable levels of risk and harm due to lax standards and internal controls.

The CFPB put out a broad request for information on data brokers in the financial services industry.

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

Brex launched Brex Travel, an integrated travel and expense management solution.

Amazon launched Express Payout, to let businesses get paid out for purchases in 24 hours via Amazon Pay.

UK electronic money institution Verto launched USD accounts.

Swedish open banking startup Payer launched account-to-account payments.

Checkout.com launched its own card issuing product, a Marqeta rival for Europe.

Curve is launching wearable fintech.

Pile, a treasury package for high-growth startups and venture funds, came out of stealth.

Adyen released an enhanced authentication solution to let fintechs convert more customers.

Pinwheel debuted a new deposit-switching tool.

Ekko launched an employee ESG incentive program.

📰 Other News

Short seller Hindenburg released a scathing report on Block (formerly Square) the owner of Cash App. The report alleges, among other things, that 40-75% of Cash App’s users are fake or duplicates of others. Block's response was short and to-the-point: "We intend to work with the SEC and explore legal action against Hindenburg Research for the factually inaccurate and misleading report they shared about our Cash App business." Cash App also this week registered a digital token and NFT exchange in Bermuda.

Is Microsoft getting its groove back? After partnering with OpenAi, it was discovered that the firm’s new Edge browser has a crypto wallet prototype.

Amazon is starting to export its palm-reading payments tech to other retailers - beginning with Panera Bread.

Cross River partnered with Pay.com to launch Pay’s app in the US.

Coinbase is reportedly considering relocating outside of the US, following regulatory headwinds from the SEC.

Stables, an Australian crypto startup, is working on a USDC-to-fiat Mastercard. Encrypted messaging app Telegram will also now let its users transfer USDT through the app. USDC issuer Circle is calling for the Federal Reserve to back USDC, and also relocated its headquarters to France.

German B2B buy-now-pay-later provider Mondu launched in the UK.

Crypto firm Polygon is partnering with Salesforce on an NFT loyalty platform.

China’s Ant Group launched a female entrepreneurship program. Expensify formed an accountant steering committee.

Fintech investment banking firm FT Partners released a fintech equity research platform.

Come meet us in-person at fintechhappyhour.com, and join our angel investing syndicate.